Project Ascend

Project Ascend was a program I ran from August 2024 through January 2025. The goal was to immerse entry-level engineers in how software actually gets delivered — not tutorial exercises in isolation, but stand-ups, task boards, issues, and story pointing on a shared codebase.

What it does

The program centered on professional practice:

• Regular stand-ups and sprint-style task management so participants learned how work gets tracked and unblocked
• Issues and story pointing as the unit of planning — estimates, scope, and tradeoffs out loud
• Hands-on implementation on a single capstone product rather than disconnected homework repos

Intracom was what participants built: a multi-surface product with a Next.js web app, Express/MongoDB backend, and an Electron desktop client. Code lives under the project-ascend-io org (intracom-webapp, intracom-backend, intracom-electron).

Technical approach

Intracom split across three repos — web, API, desktop — so participants had to coordinate interfaces and ownership the way a small team would. TypeScript end to end on the app surfaces; MongoDB on the backend.

The pedagogical bet was that process literacy (how work flows from ticket to deploy) matters as much as syntax for engineers entering their first role. Ascend optimized for that, with Intracom as the shared artifact.

Status

The program ran through early 2025. Intracom repos remain public on GitHub; Ascend itself was a founder-led immersion effort, not a commercial product. Separate from any other job-search tooling I have built since.